


Coda

by RavenDreamer



Category: Warriors - Erin Hunter
Genre: Epilogue, Far Future, Flash Fic, Gen, I love these background characters and so should you, Kiiinda canon compliant, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 03:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16189115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenDreamer/pseuds/RavenDreamer
Summary: “We’ve lived a thousand lifetimes here, Midnight. We predate the Clans, predate the Twolegplace, predate the lake itself.”“Need to eat still, yes?”A conversation between Midnight and Rock, long after the Clans as we know them





	Coda

It's hard to remember sometimes, after so many seasons, why I'm here. Here, confined to the square feet around my nest; here, holed up in this cave system half a sky-length from the the only soul who really still knows me; here, a denizen of this world rather than the next. The reasons for all three are mostly the same, anyway.   
  
The cats who live around here, the ones who bring me food and clean away my mess, they call me a prophet. A wise-one. A freak or a savant, for speaking their language and wanting to learn it in the first place. They fear me, even in my infirm state, for belonging to a species that much bulkier and stronger than their own. The badgers, not that there's many of them these days, shun me as a kin-traitor, a blunderer who intervened on the cats’ side once too often - especially now I’m too weak to visit them with advice. Not such mud to consult with me back when I was their direct link to StarClan.  
  
Nobody remembers, these days. I used to know each generation individually, marking out their quirks and passions; now all faces, all minds, blur into one.  
  
_“That crazy old badger. Must be on her last legs by now.”_  
  
I've been on my last legs since before your grandparents were born, young tom.  
  
But they still bring me food. They still respect me, in a way. They’ve forgotten what I am, but they can just about remember who. If I could leave my cave without exhaustion, maybe I'd try and tell them more, what I do, what I stand for. (Did. Stood for.)   
  
I know what my feebleness these most recent seasons means: I'm dying. Or fading, as Rock calls it. He reckons our kind aren't mortal enough to die in the usual way. He reckons there won't be enough left of us to rot in the ground, or to achieve any sort of afterlife.  
  
We discussed this the last time he came to see me, before we were both of us too weak for visiting.   
  
_“We’ve lived a thousand lifetimes here, Midnight. We predate the Clans, predate the Twolegplace, predate the lake itself.”_  
  
_“Need to eat still, yes?”_

He got into the habit, when we regularly talked together with other cats, of using the cat language with me rather than our older, truer toungue. Not that I can't understand cat perfectly well after so long dealing with them, but constantly having to translate my thoughts is tiring. Even to my ears, it sounds stilted and unnatural.  
  
_“Cats will be fine without us?”_  
  
_“As fine as I can manage. I've tried to speak to them, but it's hard enough getting them to believe in regular old StarClan, let alone the two of us.”_  
  
_“Walking in dreams they will miss.”_  
  
_“They won't know to miss it. Just like the Twolegs. It's been thousands of season-cycles since the Twolegs gave up on our kind.”_  
  
_“Thinkers they have, and Thunderpaths and light-boxes instead of powers and prophecies. Like children, need us to leave so they can mature.”_  
  
He didn't reply. That’s the problem with being a cat himself, I think: He was always too involved, seeing the Clans and Tribes as his own personal achievements. He didn't really want to believe they'd be fine after we went. I kept much more of a remove, even if it did come with a language barrier.  
  
_“Did the badgers ever have any of us to guide them, Midnight?”_  
  
_“Maybe. Long time ago. Too brutal and small-minded now. Shared cats’ prophecies. Dogs had packs, not sure if still do. Most of us gone now.”_  
  
_“As I feared.”_  
  
_“Fear? Fear binds and constrains. I hope._ ”  
  
Hope. Clans and prophecies and warrior ancestors and absolute, provable belief smooth the way at first, but in the end there is only one way for a species to truly grow, and that is to set them free. You can't guide them, you can't allow yourself the possibility of guiding them, or they're not truly free; you just have to hope.   
  
Twolegs - humans - have done wonderful things with their freedom, and terrible things. And many of them still believe in a god, and maybe that means the gods are still around somewhere, and maybe that means there's hope for me and Rock, too. And there'll be Twolegs who regret that the trees no longer speak and their ancestors no longer live in the stars, but none of them would disagree that the battles of progress that have been fought weren't worth it, none of them really resent that the moon is a real, reachable place rather than a goddess or a land of the dead…  
  
_“Rock. When time comes… We watch sun set over lake, one last time.”_


End file.
